Students give top marks to university facilities in the East of Germany

Students are consistently giving a positive rating to the facilities offered by higher education institutions in Germany’s new Länder with Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Mecklenburg West-Pomerania and Saxony among the top performers.

As part of a special evaluation based on the CHE University Ranking, student assessments of equipment such as rooms, IT infrastructure, laboratories, libraries and student work places were compared and the number of top positions counted. Higher education institutions in the East of Germany are more frequently among the top performers than those in the West. Schleswig-Holstein, Bavaria, Baden-Wuerttemberg and Brandenburg came in fifth to eigth on the Länder ranking list.

Leader Saxony-Anhalt made it into the top group with 75 per cent of students rating its university laboratories the best. The Land can also shine in terms of student work places (64 per cent), rooms (64 per cent) and library (52 per cent). Only regarding its IT infrastructure (26 per cent) is Saxony-Anhalt holding a position in the middle of the Länder ranking list. The same applies to Thuringia and Mecklenburg West-Pomerania.

"These results show once again that it is not sensible to reduce the number of study places in the new Länder but rather to offer the high quality facilities to prospective students across the country also in the future," says Detlef Müller-Böling, director of CHE, also in view of the higher education covenant.

The evaluation, an extraction from the CHE University Ranking, takes into account the views of approximately 75.000 students from 2004 - 2006.

The new CHE University Ranking 2007 will be published on 9 May. The data on humanities and engineering sciences has been updated this year and, for the first time, Romance Studies is being included as a subject.